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Poll: Should doctors tell terminally ill patients they're dying?

As my colleague Melissa Healy noted Thursday, a British medical journal recently invited doctors who specialize in end-of-life care to debate whether patients should be told that they're terminally ill. Two London-based palliative care doctors argued in favor of disclosure, writing that it was "essential to decision-making" in addition to being the most ethical approach. The head of the palliative care section of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, meanwhile, asserted that telling patients they were terminal was "a failed model for medical decision making that creates more suffering than it relieves."